@too_many_usernames said:
My company is suffering right now through Windows 64 bit transition issues... yes we're a little late to the party, but we develop embedded code, and some of those development tools do not like 64-bit... they're just now getting transitioned over.
These days, most budget PCs come with 8GB of RAM which wouldn't be addressable if not for 64-bit. This transition happened ages ago and it wasn't like Microsoft championed it; The entire industry did from chip manufacturers, to OS manufacturers, to software vendors who were tired of their users complaining their software was crashing on big render jobs. You probably should have languished for so long somehow expecting the industry not to move forward. And if you really need to mix your environments, there's always emulation.
@too_many_usernames said:
It's also fun now that we have to support not only a dozen versions of third party tools, but now both their 32- and 64-bit versions!
If you consider that to be overwhelming, don't get into web development. Have you seen how many permutations of Android and it's crappy browser there are? Not to mention a bunch of desktop browsers across multiple operating systems with multiple screen sizes and DPIs. The fact that you have a clear list of build targets makes your job pretty easy to automate a build and even automate a testing harness.
@too_many_usernames said:
Yes, part of the WTF is we don't just say "sorry we no longer support third party tools from 7 years ago."
You summed it up nicely there. Web developers used to complain endlessly about IE6, yet they continued to bend over backwards to support it for ages. Your company should have a clear roadmap for their end users defining when old software and systems cease being supported. Then you can tell any stragglers that if they want to continue using the old stuff, they can't expect to get new features or support if something breaks.